Rohit Nalluri

‘Why are you wandering the streets in the middle of the night?’, the policeman asked.
‘Sir’, replied Nasruddin, ‘if I knew the answer to that question, I would have been home hours ago.’

Rumi

Stopping at the side of the mountain
And pausing to look down
Upon the way I had come –
The long grey-brown river-like path,
the wood-green fountain of foliage,
golden in spring, and in winter ice-brown – I,
seeing past the crisscrossed leaves and the hanging mist,
Happened to look at myself looking up,
From here at the top of the mountain,
From here peering down.

I couldn’t get a word down to him there
walking up, unsure, through the past –
He was a me displaced in time and space,
walking up but looking down.
I could only linger and stare, and then too,
To linger any longer would be to displace
myself not just in time but also space, and
as that wouldn’t do, I
set about keeping my pace,
praying he would learn the same lesson –
That when you trek up the mountain of life
do not hurry, nor do unnecessarily wait.
Live each moment as it comes, and let go
when it changes state.

Thinking of such things I climbed
higher still, the peak yet far away,
missing the sight of chalk-blue flowers with
their faces full and the sound of silence
crunching between my feet,
walking up but looking up,
failing to see birds take flight, and
that the grass had grown.
But turning a corner I
found myself sitting on an age-worn stone.
Baffled
I asked him – a being placed in time and space –
why do you wait?!
You are a being of being, don’t
you have times in which to be,
or places to go?!
Shaking his head with a smile he said,
‘I arrived a long time ago.’

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